Sun-Times Reprimands "Mr. Handsome"

By Chuck Sudo in News on May 1, 2012 8:20PM

Local sports media critic Ed Sherman reports the Sun-Times has reprimanded their Guillen family correspondent, Joe Cowley, after Cowley fired off a series of sexist tweets on his now-deleted twitter feed Sunday.

Sherman posted a statement from new Sun-Times editor Jim Kirk.

"The Chicago Sun-Times is an institution with important social responsibilities, and we expect those who represent our paper to act with the respect and sensitivity that our readers deserve. Mr. Cowley’s remarks were offensive and he has been reprimanded appropriately."

While Cowley is cooling his heels, other sharks smell blood in the water and are bringing their own accounts that maybe Cowley's Twitter act may not be that far off from his real personality. SB Nation Chicago's Ricky O'Donnell—a former Sun-Times web editor—shared his story of how he claimed Cowley got him fired from the paper with Deadspin.

It's worth stressing at this point that O'Donnell has an ax to grind and his admission that he was tweeting about Cowley in the Sun-Times newsroom (while promoting his former website Tremendous Upside Potential) likely facilitated his firing.

Most reports on Cowley's Twitter comeuppance focus on his playing a role online to attract attention to himself. We, and others, called it "playing the heel." If he was trying to be satirical, he wasn't doing a good job. The A.V. Club's Marcus Gilmer wrote what Cowley was guilty of was "pointless antagonism, which should be above someone working for a major newspaper in the country’s third-largest city" and obscures the fact that he often makes salient points in his columns.